State Rep. Ken Paxton doesn't think it would help taxpayers to know whether he or other lawmakers are making money off state contracts. That's what we glean from a story done by Jay Root of the Associated Press' Austin bureau (spotted via The Chronicle), who says Paxton, a McKinney Republican, and another GOP lawmaker, Byron Cook of Corsicana, are investors in a company that sells in-car dashboard video camera systems to state police agencies in Texas and elsewhere.

I'm on record in the story as saying that lawmakers ought be required to disclose that businesses in which they have an interest are doing business with the state. Paxton disagrees with me, Root reports.

So here's the upshot of it: Because lawmakers are required to list their business entities, but not point out which ones do business with the state, there's no way for you, the taxpayer, to know which state legislators are benefiting from state contracts unless you get yourself records of who has state contracts. And how many of you average citizens out there (not counting nerdy media folks like me) have a database handy of all the contracts the state maintains? Probably not too many of you.

The legislators apparently want you to have to go that extra mile to get that list of state contracts and do the cross-checking against their disclosure forms -- and I suspect they know that most average folks don't have the time or inclination to do that. That allows lawmakers to continue to do business with the state without most of the public ever knowing about it.

In other words, the "personal financial disclosure forms" mandated under state law tell only part of the story, not the whole story.

Speaking of personal financial disclosures, here's Paxton's most recent one. He lists three outstanding notes to Enforcement Video (a.k.a. WatchGuard) in Part 3, but does not expressly list it among the business entities in which he has an interest in part 7B.

What about you?